by Steven Roth “In the Beginning…Was the Unit of Account” – Twelve Myths About Money November 19th, 2017 Jan Kregel presented a great dinner speech at the recent Modern Monetary Theory Conference, touching on some of the fundamental ways we think about money and economics. (Sorry, no recording or transcript available.) I had a brief conversation with […]
I’ve been trying to learn a bit more about PPACA (aka, Obamacare) and its effects. It hasn’t been something that has interested me a great deal until the last week or so, so I am approaching this from a position of ignorance. But I have been reading through as much material as I can find. […]
Devin Smioth at New Economic Perspective points us to ‘where does the money go?”: After President Trump signed the GOP tax plan into law, some of the bill’s corporate beneficiaries have offered workers minor bonuses. But NEP’s Bill Black says they’re keeping most of the money for themselves — and starting a new global race […]
Support the Census The alarm has been sounded that Trump’s census apparatchiks are planning to include a citizenship question in the short form that will be used to generate the full count in 2020. This count, mandated by the constitution and conducted every ten years, is the basis for voting district apportionment and formulas for allocating […]
December jobs report: late cycle mediocre growth reasserts itself HEADLINES: +143,000 jobs added U3 unemployment rate unchanged at 4.1% U6 underemployment rate rose +0.1% from 8.0% to 8.1% Here are the headlines on wages and the chronic heightened underemployment: Wages and participation rates Not in Labor Force, but Want a Job Now: rose +43,000 from […]
Trump celebrates his (very expensive) tax cuts for himself and his rich golfing buddies Remember how Trump sold the Republicans’ $1.5 trillion-deficit-creating tax cut plan as a boon for the middle class that was going to create jobs and raise wages? That was in September, when he told congressional lawmakers at the White House that […]
By Steve Roth (originally published at Evonomics) Today’s mountains of wealth throttle the very engine of wealth creation itself. Insanely Concentrated Wealth Is Strangling Our Prosperity Remember Smaug the dragon, in The Hobbit? He hoarded up a vast pile of wealth, and then he just hung out in his cave, sitting on it (with occasional forays to […]
By Maia Szalavitz via Naked Capitalism and cross posted from Evonomics; originally co-published at the Guardian and Economic Hardship Reporting Project. Why Inequality Predicts Homicide Rates Better Than Any Other Variable – research suggests that inequality raises the stakes of fights for status among men. The connection is so strong that, according to the World Bank, a simple […]
I had a post the other day trying to make sense of changes in healthcare costs. Based on some of the comments to that post, a bit more thought, some data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and the CPI-All Urban Consumers, I think my point distills down to this graph: (click to embiggen) The […]